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Don't forget that Ive languished for a long time at Apple until Steve talent scouted him and promoted him up after he returned.

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Exactly - Ive was planning to resign until Jobs made him VP. Apple were literally days away from losing him. Were it not for Jobs' insight, taste and autocratic approach, we probably would never have heard of Ive. Nokia lost their top designer last month, for fairly obvious reasons[1]. Google's "20% time" led to Gmail, Google News, Adsense and Orkut - you have to wonder how many products Microsoft engineers might have developed given half the chance.

[1] http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/09/13/anssi-vanjoki-nokias-sma...

I think Microsoft's situation is even more sad than that.

How much cool new stuff as Microsoft Research dreamed up that got snuffed out when the management got wind of it but didn't think that it was worth productizing?

IBM had the same problem -- an amazing think tank, laden with talent (probably all of IBM's worthwhile talent), churning out amazing R&D projects... very few of which ever went beyond prototypes. Like IBM's PDA, for example...

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